What's happening in Louisiana's historic town of St. Francisville; where time slows just enough to enjoy the simple pleasures and unique treasures. Essays, blurbs, observations and photos from a small southern town with charm, history and friendship.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

If only these walls could talk! How often have we lamented that the lessons of history might be lost without the voices of the past recounting their experiences. In the four decades that the West Feliciana Historical Society has hosted the Audubon Pilgrimage in St. Francisville, this popular spring fling has featured beautifully restored antebellum plantations and historic townhouses, brilliantly blooming azaleas, hostesses resplendent in replicated 1820s garb, old-time rural crafts and skills, and even glamorous nighttime entertainments. But initially something was missing, some intimate personalized voice resonating through time, and the ancestral oil portraits, the architectural treasures, the leather-bound literature…all gave only mute testament to past glories and sorrows.

One of the historic churches featured on the pilgrimage is Grace Episcopal, the oldest church in St. Francisville and second oldest Episcopal congregation in the state, established in 1827. Its first rector was the Reverend William R. Bowman, second husband of widowed Eliza Pirrie of Oakley Plantation whom the artist Audubon was hired to tutor in the early 1820s; their son would marry the beautiful belle Sarah Turnbull of Rosedown Plantation.

The present brick church, which replaced an early simple wooden building, is reminiscent of the Gothic country churches of rural England, from whence came many of the pioneering settlers of St. Francisville. Its cornerstone was laid by Leonidas Polk, the Fighting Bishop of the Confederacy, in June 1858, the same year an immense Pilcher organ was shipped downriver from St. Louis and fitted into the south transcept in memory of Judge George Mathews.

From Judge Mathews’ plantation came the oak saplings that now shade the cemetery where he rests in peace along with many of the early settlers. Among the earliest burials was that of baby Edward Baldwin, whose death in the 1840s was recorded as ‘flung from buggy.’ During the Civil War, as St. Francisville received heavy shelling from a Union gunboat on the nearby Mississippi River, old Aunt Sylvia Chew, a free woman of color, took refuge before the altar until a cannon ball crashed through the window over her head; she then fled to the cemetery and put her faith in the substantially built tomb of her old acquaintance Dr. Ira Smith.

With the serene cemetery so full of history and stories, it was no wonder that pilgrimage planners conceived the idea of raising the dead to tell their stories, and who better to direct this fascinating performance than local resident and Grace parishioner Shirley Pourciau, who had earned a Master’s degree in Theater from the University of Illinois and then spent 30 years as a public school teacher, enthusiastically directing plays and pageants and all manner of church shows until she retired from Lee High in 1983. Early performances of the Cemetery Tales utilized the talents of relatives and colleagues from Baton Rouge, but Mrs. Pourciau soon realized that the St. Francisville area abounded in homegrown talent.

Some of these frustrated thespians are real pros, like Dave and Valerie Barnes, who have had many years of professional radio and television experience, while others are simply blessed with a flair for the dramatic, but each gives a memorable performance bringing to life a carefully selected cross-section of St. Francisville residents beginning in the heady years just prior to the Civil War and continuing through the trying times afterward. And so, as dusk falls and the fireflies flit amid the moss-draped live oaks, costumed spirits rise among the tombstones to relate their poignant stories, and in doing so, relate the history of St. Francisville itself. An introduction to Grace’s history is given from the brick front steps of the church, and then young guides lead visitors through the cemetery lit by candles and torches, all to the strains of acoustic period music provided by talented David Porter.

Beside the sturdy tomb of Dr. Ira Smith, who died Christmas day 1850, stands his widow Mary Ann Gray, half-sister of Eliza Pirrie, relating how her husband named their plantation Troy after his boyhood New York home. Another 1850 burial was that of Grace church vestryman Levi Blount, who hanged himself from an oak tree after falling into debt over a costly sugar mill; Blount’s widow Lavinia, who with her New England bluestocking sisters came south to provide young ladies with sound classical educations, relates her story as well. William Dana Hatch was another early vestry member of Grace Church; a merchant in Bayou Sara, he died in 1866 at the age of 54, and over the years his tomb, surrounded by fancy iron fencing, has irreverently been dubbed Hatch’s Pen.

The Turnbulls of Rosedown are well represented in the cemetery and in the performance, with three different generations telling their tales, beginning with Martha Barrow Turnbull who with her husband Daniel built magnificent Rosedown Plantation in the 1830s and over six decades surrounded the home with glorious gardens based on landscapes seen on her European honeymoon. Her grandson Daniel Turnbull Bowman was slain in 1900 after volunteering with the army unit sent to quell the Moro insurrection in the Philippines. Lt. Bowman is portrayed graveside with such elan by Hamilton Willis, complete with the riding boots that are his customary attire, that during one performance, as he related how his devoted mother fretted over his perilous military service, the cell phone forgotten in his pocket rang, and without missing a beat Willis adlibbed, “That must be her now.” The third of the Turnbull-Bowman spirits is the most recent, the fifth generation, Mamie Fort Thompson, last of the area grande dames and noted for her wicked wit. Into her 90s “Miss Mamie” presided over Catalpa Plantation, sharing with each and every tourist who came calling a glass of the potent sherry referred to as “grandma’s daily dalliance with naughtiness,” and proving to the world that old southern belles never die, nor do they ever lose one iota of their charm.

A deceased rector of Grace Church tells his tale in this graveyard filled with fine statuary and Victorian monuments of marble and stone. But amidst such splendor sadly stand characters like Tullia Richardson whose plantation was aptly named Misery, and Hannah McDaniel who died in 1885 at age 90 so impoverished she had no tombstone at all. When her daughter’s attorney-husband was killed in the explosion of the steamboat Princessen route to the opening of the Supreme Court in New Orleans, the family sold their elegant townhouse on Royal St. in St. Francisville and opened a boarding house in New Orleans to make ends meet. Another distinguished barrister mortally wounded aboard the Princess in 1859 was Uriah Burr Phillips; when the steamboat’s boiler exploded rounding Conrad’s Point just below Baton Rouge, those passengers not killed instantly were laid out on the lawn of the Conrad’s Cottage Plantation. Burr was shipped home to linger a week before dying and was laid to rest beneath a hand-carved Italian marble monument.

Beside the enormous stone cross marking his family plot arises the spirit of Judge George Mathews, chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court from 1812 until his death in 1836; his father was an early governor of Georgia, and several brothers-in-law served on the first vestry of Grace Church. His is the earliest burial included in the Cemetery Tales, while nearby is one of the most recent, the 27th Marine Corps Commandant, General Robert H. Barrow of Rosale Plantation, whose distinguished military career took him around the world but who returned to his boyhood home for retirement. Declining burial in Arlington National Cemetery, General Barrow opted to be laid to rest in 2008 beside his beloved wife Patty, the interment ceremony with its impressive military honor guard and booming gun salutes attended by everybody in town, including school children.

The voices of the past speak to us in many ways, sometimes harshly and sometimes gently, but rarely so movingly as when the spirits of the dead rise to tell their stories beside their tombstones. These Cemetery Tales take place on Friday evening, March 18, as part of the annual Audubon Pilgrimage, which celebrates a southern spring in St. Francisville, the glorious garden spot of Louisiana’s English Plantation Country. For 40 years the sponsoring West Feliciana Historical Society has thrown open the doors of significant historic structures to commemorate the tenure there of artist-naturalist John James Audubon as he painted a number of his famous bird folios.

Features of the 2011 Audubon Pilgrimage March 18, 19 and 20 include two historic townhouses: Avondale and White’s Cottage, and in the surrounding countryside two 19th-century plantations: Wakefield and Spring Grove, plus Afton Villa Gardens, Rosedown and Audubon State Historic Sites, three 19th-century churches and the Rural Homestead with lively demonstrations of the rustic skills of daily pioneer life. Tour hostesses are clad in the exquisitely detailed costumes of the 1820’s, nationally recognized for their authenticity.

The National Register-listed historic district around Royal Street is filled during the day with the happy sounds of costumed children singing and dancing the Maypole; in the evening as candles flicker and fireflies flit among the ancient moss-draped live oaks, there is no place more inviting for a leisurely stroll. Besides the Graveyard Tours at Grace Episcopal cemetery, Friday evening also features old-time Hymn Singing at the United Methodist Church and a wine and cheese reception at the West Feliciana Historical Society museum headquarters. Light Up The Night Saturday evening features live music, dinner and drinks. For tickets and tour information, contact West Feliciana Historical Society, Box 338, St. Francisville, LA 70775;phone 225-635-6330; online www.audubonpilgrimage.info, email sf@audubonpilgrimage.info.

Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, and Natchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination, but visitors find it especially enjoyable this time of year when the glorious 19th-century gardens are still filled with winter-blooming camellias mixed with the earliest bloomers of spring, the flowering bulbs and fruit trees. A number of splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours daily: the Cottage Plantation, Butler Greenwood Plantation, the Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation and Afton Villa Gardens seasonally. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer fascinating living-history demonstrations most weekends to allow visitors to experience 19th-century plantation life and customs.

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking, birding, photography, hunting. There are unique art galleries plus specialty and antiques shops, many in restored historic structures, and some fine little restaurants throughout the St. Francisville area serving everything from soul food to Chinese and Mexican cuisine, seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register-listed historic district, and there are also modern motel accommodations for large bus groups.
For visitor information, call St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873 or West Feliciana Tourist Commission at 225-635-4224; online visit www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities, including the lively monthly third Saturday morning Community Market Day in Parker Park) or www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

The fortieth annual Audubon Pilgrimage March 18, 19 and 20, 2011, celebrates a southern spring in St. Francisville, the glorious garden spot of Louisiana’s English Plantation Country. For four decades the sponsoring West Feliciana Historical Society, its docents resplendent in authentic 1820’s costumes, has thrown open the doors of significant historic structures to commemorate the tenure there of artist-naturalist John James Audubon.

When Audubon arrived in the St. Francisville area in 1821, he recorded in his journal that the rich lushness of the landscape and flourishing birdlife “all excited my admiration.” Having set for himself the staggering task of painting all the birds of this immense fledgling country, Audubon would find the inspiration to paint dozens of his bird studies while residing at Oakley Plantation, one of the featured tour homes.

The Oakley house, a splendid West Indies-style three-story structure with jalousied galleries, was well established by the time Irish-born traveler Fortescue Cuming visited the area in 1809, recording in his travelogue a visit to Lucretia and James Pirrie’s plantation, reached via “a good road through a forest abounding with that beautiful and majestick evergreen, the magnolia or American laurel.” Cuming found Oakley already a fine plantation with a hundred slaves “and the best garden I had yet seen in this country.”

Wakefield Plantation

In 1821 the Pirries hired Audubon as tutor and drawing instructor for their young daughter Eliza, and he arrived by steamboat, penniless and with a string of failed business ventures behind him, but rich in talent and dreams. Born in 1785 in Santa Domingo to a French ship captain and his Creole mistress, Audubon was raised in France and sent as a young teen to learn English and a trade in America. In 1820 he set out for New Orleans with only his gun, flute, violin, bird books, portfolios of his drawings, chalks, watercolors, drawing papers in a tin box, and a dog-eared journal, and the meager living he earned painting portraits in the city made the Pirrie offer particularly appealing. The artist’s arrangement at Oakley called for him to be paid $60 a month plus room and board, with half of each day free to collect and paint bird specimens from the surrounding woods, where he cut a dashing figure in his long flowing locks, frilly shirts and satin breeches.
Immensely popular as the central focus of the Audubon State Historic Site since 1947, Oakley has been beautifully restored and carefully furnished in the late Federal style. Another historic feature of the pilgrimage with direct associations with Audubon is Wakefield Plantation, originally part of the property holdings of Alexander Stirling, who acquired roughly 10 square miles after arriving in America in the late 1770s. An 1806 visitor described Stirling as “an old Scotchman, plain and blunt in his manners, but possessed of an immense fortune.” His wife Ann Alston was the sister of Oakley Plantation mistress Lucretia Alston Pirrie, mother of young Eliza whom Audubon was hired to tutor.

Alexander’s son Lewis Stirling married Sarah Turnbull and hired railroad master carpenter Joseph Miller to build a commodious home on the property in 1834, just as Sarah’s brother Daniel was establishing Rosedown Plantation to the south. The house was a grand Greek Revival 2 ½-story structure of wood with Tuscan columns of pie-shaped brick. Fourteen-foot ceilings accommodated innovations like rare built-in mahogany cabinets, handsome sliding doors, and the fine furnishings purchased on an extended journey to the northeast and London. When widowed Sarah Stirling died in 1875, one of the strangest of all estate divisions was effected by four heirs, with the house roof raised to permit the removal of the second floor, then lowered onto the remaining first floor and the chimneys repaired. From the second story came lumber to build two smaller homes. After six generations of Stirlings, the home was purchased and restored by Dr. and Mrs. Eugene Berry, who raise registered longhorns on the property.

Plantation Tours

Sarah Stirling’s brother Daniel Turnbull and his wife Martha Barrow, daughter of William Barrow of Highland Plantation, were also constructing a fine house in 1834, and it would be called Rosedown. The Turnbulls’ daughter Sarah, beautiful “National Belle” of 1849, married the son of Eliza Pirrie of Oakley Plantation, further intermingling these early families.
Mississippi-born writer Stark Young said of Rosedown, “Of all the houses in the world it seemed to be the beloved of its own trees and gardens.” That charm and appeal continues unabated today, the house folded in the embrace of 27 surrounding acres of 19th-century gardens and live oaks grown to immense size, and indeed the beauty of the glorious gardens has saved the house itself more than once through the generations.

The detailed gardening diaries of Martha Turnbull, spanning nearly 60 years, proved that she was one of the first to introduce azaleas and camellias to the South. These records proved invaluable when the late Catherine Fondren Underwood purchased the property in 1956, her keen eye recognizing the lush beauty of the gardens and haunting dignity of the house even through the creeping undergrowth and peeling plaster. A meticulous 10-year restoration salvaged the house and its unique collection of plantings, and today Rosedown, like Oakley, is a much-visited state historic site.

Another Barrow descendent in 1895 built Spring Grove on a 500-acre tract carved from the extensive lands of Afton Villa Plantation. Wade Hampton Richardson IV’s mother Amanda was the daughter of Bennett H. Barrow of Highland Plantation; his father, Wade H. Richardson III, represented West Feliciana in the state legislature during the Civil War before dying a month prior to Wade IV’s birth in 1869. Young Wade would himself serve as a member of the parish police jury, but found farming more to his liking, branching out into the dairy business, with an immense 200x100-foot barn capable of holding 140 registered cows.

Young dancers at courthouse

The progressive Mr. Richardson was an early advocate of improved roadways, and a good seven years before anyone else had the courage to try such a newfangled invention, he was motoring about in the first automobile in the parish. To accommodate it in style, he even had a gingerbread-trimmed porte cochere attached to the side of the Spring Grove house. The home itself, with its large central gable, was glowingly described in turn-of-the-century publications as “an ideal country home supplied with modern conveniences to make rural life agreeable.” Now Spring Grove, at the southern boundary of the magnificent Afton Villa gardens, enfolds the fourth, fifth and sixth generations of direct descendants, the family of Anne and George Kurz.
In addition to the large country homes on tour this year, there are also a couple of historic townhouses in recognition of the fact that not everyone lived on an antebellum plantation; many of the important support services and supply houses were located in town, and many merchants lived, if not directly in their places of business, at least nearby.

Surrounded by a picket fence, White’s Cottage is described as a 1903 urban adaptation of that emblem of Upland Southern culture known as a pen-and-passage house, its flanking rooms or “pens” divided by an enclosed breezeway that, when left open by early settlers, gave rise to the more familiar appellation of “dog-trot” house. The front porch spans the full length of the two separate “pens” divided by the central hallway, unifying all under a single roof. Its precarious hilltop perch vividly illustrates St. Francisville’s traditional description as the town two miles long and two yards wide, the limited available space ensuring that commercial and residential spaces coexist as good neighbors in such close proximity.

The cottage was built by Robert Clifford Brasseaux in the opening years of the 19th century, one of a number of such cottages in the little town that served as commercial and cultural hub of the surrounding plantation country. Brasseaux brought the first gasoline distributorship to the area in 1910 and sold kerosene to the little isolated country stores that kept hand-cranked drums of it on their porches for customers in the days before electricity. The kerosene was sent up from the Esso refinery in Baton Rouge via the LR&N railway, and Brasseaux unloaded the tank cars into barrels hauled by a mule-drawn wagon.

Upon the advent of automobile traffic, the enterprising Mr. Brasseaux also opened the first service station in St. Francisville. It was located in close proximity to White’s Cottage, at the upper corner of Royal and Ferdinand Streets in the store/residence of his German immigrant father-in-law. The family gas distributorship is now owned by Brasseaux’s grandson J. Russell Daniel, and it was recently recognized for a full century of service to the community. Since 1978 White’s Cottage has been the comfortable home of Lynn LeSueur Leak, who has furnished it with fine pieces holding sentimental value.
At the opposite end of town is Avondale, and no house better illustrates the vicissitudes of life along Ol’ Man River than this one. Avondale began in 1904 as a fancy late Victorian Queen Anne mansion complete with round two-story tower and upstairs balcony surrounded by an elaborate balustrade, one of the most magnificent structures in all of low-lying Bayou Sara. That bustling port, once the busiest between New Orleans and Memphis, sat right on the Mississippi, its banks teeming in the 19th century with steamboat traffic. There it was persistently inundated by spring floods, the one in 1912 being particularly disastrous, its implications for commercial interests catastrophic and its floodwaters rushing all the way up into Avondale’s second story just as the young daughter of the house prepared for her wedding.

The wedding was moved up the hill into St. Francisville, and so was the house called Avondale, while the port city of Bayou Sara would eventually be completely obliterated by a series of disastrous fires and floods. As the resident family of Mayor John F. Irvine Jr. dismally contemplated the ruination of their financial empire in Bayou Sara, Avondale itself was dismantled, removed up the hill, and rebuilt high and dry on St. Francisville’s blufflands safe from the Mississippi’s meanderings, its architectural extravagances scaled down to suit the family’s straitened circumstances in 1919.

Its propitious location high atop Catholic Hill would in 1943 attract to Avondale new residents, Drs. Philip and Mary Niebergall; he was the well-loved small-town family physician. A restoration by New Orleans architect Richard Koch reconfigured and revitalized the home, and avid gardener Dr. Phil soon surrounded it with thriving groves of camellias, azaleas and other flowering trees and shrubs. Current owners Michelle and Craig Roth have continued the tradition. Michelle, a master gardener, cheerfully copes with some 5 acres of plantings and says she stopped counting camellia japonicas at 300.

Other features of the 2011 Audubon Pilgrimage include three 19th-century churches as well as the Rural Homestead with its lively demonstrations of the rustic skills of daily pioneer life. Tour hostesses are clad in the exquisitely detailed costumes of the 1820’s, nationally recognized for their authenticity. The National Register-listed Historic District around Royal Street is filled during the day with the happy sounds of costumed children playing nostalgic singing games and dancing the Maypole; in the evening as candles flicker and fireflies flit among the ancient moss-draped live oaks, there is no place more inviting for a leisurely, lingering stroll. Friday evening features old-time Hymn Signing at the United Methodist Church, Graveyard Tours raising the dead to tell their stories at Grace Episcopal Church cemetery, and a wine and cheese reception at the West Feliciana Historical Society museum/pilgrimage headquarters. Saturday evening, the Light Up The Night soiree features dancing to live music, dinner and drinks.

Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, and Natchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination, but visitors find it especially enjoyable when the glorious 19th-century gardens are still filled with late-blooming camellias mixed with colorful spring azaleas. A number of splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours daily: the Cottage Plantation, Butler Greenwood Plantation, the Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation and Afton Villa Gardens seasonally. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer fascinating living-history demonstrations most weekends to allow visitors to experience 19th-century plantation life and customs.
The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking, birding, photography, hunting. There are unique art galleries plus specialty and antiques shops, many in restored historic structures, and some fine little restaurants throughout the St. Francisville area serving everything from soul food to Chinese and Mexican cuisine, seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register-listed historic district, and there are also modern motel accommodations for large bus groups.
For visitor information, call St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873 or West Feliciana Tourist Commission at 225-635-4224; online visit www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities, including the lively monthly third Saturday morning Community Market Day in Parker Park) or www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

St. Francisville’s location, high atop blufflands overlooking the Mississippi River in West Feliciana Parish, has been both its blessing and, by some accounts, its curse. Safe from the floodwaters that obliterated its sister city of Bayou Sara right on the river’s banks, St. Francisville was precariously perched on a narrow finger ridge that limited its growth potential, for the town lots fell off steeply into deep hollows on either side of the single main thoroughfare. In a way, this was a good thing, preventing inappropriate development and limiting modern incursions in a historic district where the cozy mix of residential and commercial structures from the 19th and early 20th centuries happily coexist to provide present-day viability. And they can still call it the town that’s 2 miles long and 2 yards wide, with not so much exaggeration.
Founded in the opening years of the 19th century by predominantly Anglo settlers, the little town was an important social, commercial and cultural center for the extensive cotton plantations surrounding it. Its early streets were rude dirt tracks along which herds of cattle and mule-drawn wagons piled high with crops were driven before descending the steep hill to the port at Bayou Sara for shipment on riverboats to New Orleans and thence the world.

Hotel in Bayou Sara

But improvements were soon effected. By 1809 a hotel had been erected, serving as legislative headquarters for the fledgling government of the independent Republic of West Florida when, in 1810, the Anglo settlers joined together to overthrow a weak and corrupt Spanish regime still trying to hold onto the Florida Parishes well after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Over St. Francisville have flown the flags of more governments than any other part of the state—France, England, Spain, the West Florida Republic, the State of Louisiana, the Confederacy, and the United States, some of them more than once.
There the Louisiana Territory’s third newspaper was established, the state’s second library was begun in 1812, a Masonic Lodge was chartered in 1817, and in 1819 an open-air brick market hall was built with arches through which produce wagons could be driven (this would later serve as the town hall). By 1828 the state’s first Episcopal congregation outside New Orleans joined to form Grace Church.

Right in town there were gristmills and cotton gins, livery stables and haberdasheries, drygoods emporiums and supply merchants capable of providing everything the plantations needed, from buggies and fine furnishings to coffins and farm tools, often supplying it all on credit against the next year’s crop. In 1853 the St. Francisville Chronicle reported that, according to the tax rolls, the parish of West Feliciana, with St. Francisville at its core, contained 2,231 free whites, 70 free blacks, and 10,298 slaves producing 2,873 hogheads of sugar, 4,318 barrels of molasses, 334,000 bushels of corn and 23,860 bales of cotton selling at about $70 a bale.

Jewish Synagogue

The prosperity of the antebellum Cotton Kingdom gave way after the Civil War to some lean years as the area struggled with a declining economy no longer supported by agriculture. Many of St. Francisville’s historic structures fell into disrepair; many of the merchants of the town, some of them Jewish immigrants who had provided the practicalities and financing for the plantation economy, moved to urban areas where the prospects for success seemed more promising. The little town remained, however, the parish seat of government and commerce, and by the 1970s a movement began, spearheaded by the West Feliciana Historical Society, to foster a renewed appreciation of its history and heritage. An annual Audubon Pilgrimage tour of historic homes encouraged the entire community to work together to spruce up and share its treasures with visitors, and a late 1970’s survey documented over 140 downtown buildings of sufficient architectural significance to be listed in 1980 on the National Register of Historic Places in an official Historic District that was expanded in 1982.
When the St. Francisville Main Street program was established in 1994, it was able to provide incentive grants for a great deal of refurbishing and refreshing of the downtown area, where the practical combination of business and residential use ensures continued vitality. There may still be only a few thousand residents in St. Francisville, but this little Mississippi River town has something many small towns across the country lack: a vital downtown that is very much alive. When the shops close for the evening, the oak-shaded brick sidewalks come alive with dog-walkers and skateboarders and strollers chatting over picket fences with porch-rockers and swing-sitters decompressing on gingerbread-trimmed galleries, before heading on down to the local café for food and fellowship as exuberant youngsters carouse and dance to the live local band.

Grace Episcopal Church

The admittedly slow pace allows for plenty of time to stop and smell the climbing roses and ancient camellias blooming in every yard, and residents wouldn’t have it any other way. When a new Mississippi River bridge was first proposed to connect St. Francisville on the east bank of the river with New Roads on the west, replacing the increasingly unreliable state-run car ferry, economic development proponents wanted the raised bridge approaches to go right through the center of the historic district. Determined (some called them “stubborn”) townsfolk banded together to push the country’s longest cable-stayed bridge farther south, thus saving fragile downtown structures and a quiet way of life from the stress of constant heavy traffic, harmful vibrations and noise pollution.

Old Bank in historic district

While some of the town’s historic structures had been fortunate enough to benefit from privately funded facelifts over the years, even more benefitted once St. Francisville became an official Main Street community, backed by grants and funding from both state and national Main Street programs designed to breathe new life into the nation’s deteriorating downtowns. The grants made to spruce up downtown commercial structures were matched by more than a million dollars in private investments.
From the grandly baroque 1905 bank building housing a nationally popular button jewelry company to the two-story double-galleried 1817 Masonic Lodge and the 1819 Market Hall, from the simple 19th-century structure used to store coffins to the tiny headquarters of the black benevolent/burial society founded in 1883, dozens of downtown buildings benefitted from these grants, turning the entire historic district into a popular and picturesque year-round tourist destination. Writing in “Preservation in Print,” Linda Rascoe of the Louisiana Main Street Program called St. Francisville’s downtown historic district a visual feast, saying “the closely packed, village-like streetscape contributes to the picturesque pastoral setting where the purity and integrity of the architecture provide a tangible sense of history and a major draw for its primary industry, tourism.”
The surrounding countryside has dozens of National Register-listed antebellum plantations and glorious 19th-century gardens, plus unsurpassed recreational opportunities in the rugged Tunica Hills, while right in downtown St. Francisville there are historic churches, Bed & Breakfasts, a bustling courthouse complex in daily use, plus an oak-shaded public park complete with bandstand that hosts a number of celebrations throughout the year---all on just two main streets. On-going restorations of the historic synagogue and first public school, on a site overlooking the Mississippi River, pay tribute to early Jewish contributions to the town, and indeed the wonderful brick Julius Freyhan School was one of the first recipients of a small façade grant the year St. Francisville was designated a Main Street Community. In a restored vintage hardware store, the historical society maintains a fascinating museum and tourist information center, space shared with the parish Tourist Commission and Main Street offices.
The enthusiastic Main Street directors in St. Francisville, following the program philosophy of ‘Promotion, Organization, Economic Revitalization and Design coupled with Preservation,’ have led the way in spearheading the movement to ensure that the downtown area retains its appeal, with great financial back-up from the town’s Economic Development Fund providing extras like public restrooms, bricked sidewalks and tourist information kiosks in central locations.

Home on Royal St.

Local festivals are carefully planned to complement the town’s history and heritage, bearing in mind the shift in tourism demographics toward more active ecotourism and hands-on living history, with many of the smaller festivals---the monthly community arts market in the park, the White Linen Night, the Trick-or-Treat Down Main Street---designed specifically to draw visitors to the downtown area to shop. The spring pilgrimage showcases area plantation homes and historic townhouses in a fun community frolic as the azaleas are at their peak, while the Audubon Country Birdfest and summer Hummingbird Festival are ideally suited for this area where artist John James Audubon painted dozens of his Birds of America studies in 1821. In June, The Day The War Stopped is a Civil War re-enactment like no other, commemorating not a booming battle but a brief moment of civility in the midst of a bloody struggle when Confederate and Union Masons joined peaceably in the burial of a Yankee gunboat commander in the Episcopal church cemetery downtown. Fall’s Garden Symposium and the Yellow Leaf Arts Festival highlight the glorious 19th-century gardens of the area and the generations of fine artists who have drawn inspiration from its scenic vistas and bountiful wildlife, while Christmas in the Country draws thousands downtown for a holiday parade, seasonal entertainment, great shopping, and spectacular decorations that transform the entire town into a veritable winter wonderland.
The five members of the St. Francisville Historic District Commission, supported wholeheartedly by an enthusiastic longtime mayor, oversee Main Street activities and preservation projects, with the Main Street director coordinating and combining efforts like co-op advertising and the publication of tour maps and guides, with the goal of promoting tourism and encouraging the development of new businesses in town while providing the means to preserve its historic character and charm. It’s never easy to find just the right balance between economic development and historic preservation, but St. Francisville seems to be doing just that.
Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, and Natchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination, but visitors find it especially enjoyable in the winter when the glorious 19th-century gardens are filled with blooming camellias. A number of splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours daily: the Cottage Plantation, Butler Greenwood Plantation, the Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation and Afton Villa Gardens seasonally. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer fascinating living-history demonstrations most weekends to allow visitors to experience 19th-century plantation life and customs.
The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking, birding, photography, hunting. There are unique art galleries plus specialty and antiques shops, many in restored historic structures, and some fine little restaurants throughout the St. Francisville area serving everything from soul food to Chinese and Mexican cuisine, seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register-listed historic district, and there are also modern motel accommodations for large bus groups.
For visitor information, call St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873 or West Feliciana Tourist Commission at 225-635-4224; online visit www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities, including the lively monthly third Saturday morning Community Market Day in Parker Park) or www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com.